In systems programming, an interrupt is a signal to the processor emitted by hardware or software indicating an event that needs immediate attention. An interrupt alerts the processor to a high-priority condition requiring the interruption of the current code the processor is executing (the current thread). The processor responds by suspending its current activities, saving its state, and executing a small program called an interrupt handler (or interrupt service routine, ISR) to deal with the event. This interruption is temporary, and after the interrupt handler finishes, the processor resumes execution of the previous thread. There are two primary types of interrupts:
A hardware interrupt is an electronic alerting signal sent to the processor from an external device, either a part of the computer itself such as a disk controller or an external peripheral. For example, pressing a key on the keyboard or moving the mouse triggers hardware interrupts that cause the processor to read the keystroke or mouse position. Unlike the software type, hardware interrupts are asynchronous and can occur in the middle of instruction execution, requiring additional care in programming. The act of initiating a hardware interrupt is referred to as an interrupt request (IRQ).
A software interrupt is caused either by an exceptional condition in the processor itself, or a special instruction in the instruction set which causes an interrupt when it is executed. The former is often called a trap or an exception and is used for errors or events occurring during program execution that are exceptional enough that they cannot be handled within the program itself. For example, if the processor's arithmetic logic unit is commanded to divide a number by zero, this impossible demand will cause a divide-by-zero exception, perhaps causing the computer to abandon the calculation or display an error message. Software interrupt instructions function similarly to subroutine calls and are used for a variety of purposes, such as to request services from low level system software such as device drivers. For example, computers often use software interrupt instructions to communicate with the disk controller to request data be read or written to the disk.
Each interrupt has its own interrupt handler. The number of hardware interrupts is limited by the number of interrupt request (IRQ) lines to the processor, but there may be hundreds of different software interrupts.
Interrupts are a commonly used technique for computer multitasking, especially in real-time computing. Such a system is said to be interrupt-driven.